After reading the two texts about style, “The Elements of Style,” by William Strunk and E.B White, and “Style: toward clarity and Grace,” by Johephy Williams I made a few stylistic changes to my “You Tube” essay. Many of the changes dealt mainly with grammar and consistency, while others changes I made the sentences more clear.
I changed the way I made use of the colon. When I had initially read about using the colon to introduce a quotation, I began using it in almost every case. I will admit that I have never used a colon to introduce a quote before, and had always been taught to us a comma. However, presented with this novelty, I think I overused it. After re-reading this entry, I reconsidered my colon overuse. Strunk and White say that you should use the colon for “an illustrative quotation” (Strunk 7), this gave me pause to think, maybe I am only supposed to use this when I am using the quote to make my point, but not using a quote and then explaining my point in a separate sentence. I switched back to using commas before a quote and tried to be consistent in that, except in one place in my essay, when I felt it met the burden of being illustrative.
A stylistic change I edited in the essay attempted to use a more active voice, and change some of the ‘is’ verbs to more active verbs. Although, I didn’t try to do this with every sentence, and since Stunk and White advise against it: “the habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible writing,” I took the liberty of not straining too much over it, but did my best to make small edits throughout (Strunk 18). I also tried to use more meaning specific verbs.
I further made an effort to cut down on extra words, phrases, and sentences that continued to state what had already been said, and served no real purpose. This occurred mainly in phrases that I overused a bit.
In addition to removing words, I also added more words, because I felt it would clarify the essay. Williams says to “name the cast of characters” (Williams 21). I decided to indicate that Baldwin was speaking in my essay more frequently since before I kept assuming that the reader saw the commercial and knew that He was usually the voice talking. Ialso made changes to the beginnings of many of my sentences that began a paragraph because many times I began a paragraph with Baldwin’s quotes without specifying that Baldwin was talking. Further, another problem I saw with beginning the paragraphs with a quotation mark was that the leap, or transition between paragraphs was a bit choppy because the endings of the previous paragraphs were discussing the which elements of ancient style were used and then there was an abrupt transition to a quotation mark. There were also many parts in my sentences where the idea was half-done and was open for misinterpretation and I tried to close those holes. For instance, where I had written “hulu is not unique…” could have been interpreted as the company itself is not unique, but what I really meant was that, “Hulu is not completely unique in their advertisement choices,” so I wrote exactly that. I tried to make my thoughts more complete and close any gaps that I was expecting my reader to jump. I felt that I had already made an effort to keep the ‘old information’ in the beginning of the sentences and introduce the new information into the later part of the sentence, as Williams says to do, but I double checked this in my essay
Works Cited
Stunk Jr., William and White, E. B., The Elements of Style. Fourth Edition. Needam Heights, Massachusetts : Allyn and Bacon, 1979.
Williams, Joseph M., Style: Towards Clarity and Grace. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990.
